Waking up after a 27-year nightmareExonerated inmate reflects on what — and who — caused his wrongful imprisonment

MIKE TOLSON, HOUSTON CHRONICLE |
August 2, 2010

Michael Anthony Green, shown with his great-aunt Eloise Willis, said "being in prison felt like a dream. Then, one day I woke up in the morning, and it was over.”

President Ronald Reagan would soon announce it was morning in America, but for Michael Anthony Green the spring of 1983 was more of the same old thing. Sleep late and then hang the rest of the day in the local arcade playing video games. Only at night was it time to work. “Play video games all day, steal cars at night,” Green recalls. “That was it.” On April 25, business went bad. Police spotted him in a stolen car in northeast Houston and chased him till he wrecked it. He ran, but they found him hiding in a nearby garage. That’s when police put two and two together, Green now surmises. Except the answer was wrong. Just because he was boosting cars did not mean he was one of the rapists assaulting women in stolen cars. And it certainly did not mean he was involved in the gang-rape of a particular 31-year-old woman who had been abducted by four men while at a pay phone. The problem was that Green, then 18, had been spotted in the vicinity of that brutal assault a week earlier. Police had stopped young men vaguely matching the description ­­— mostly meaning young and black — who were seen in the nearby neighborhood. He was walking home, he recalled, when a Houston Police Department officer rolled up in his patrol car to see what he was doing out on the street after midnight. Green remembers that the officer was a Hispanic sergeant and very pleasant. After a quick conversation, the sergeant got a message over his radio and asked Green and another young man who had been walking with him if they would mind waiting for a woman to have a look at them. Neither knew what was going on, but they did not object. “The cops told me to turn around, and there was this blinding light in my face,” Green said. “It was the spotlight on the side of the car. I had to be standing there for a good 10 or 15 minutes. Finally they said we could go and were sorry to have taken up our time.”

‘It’s him’

Those few minutes standing in the glare ultimately translated into 27 years sitting in a cell. The assault victim who said Green was not among the men who attacked her changed her mind eight days later. That persuaded a jury to find him guilty of aggravated sexual assault and to send him to prison for 75 years. There was no physical evidence tying him to the assault, nor witness testimony, other than the victim’s, placing him at the scene of the crime. All it took was two words — “It’s him” — and Green’s future was decided. Last week the 45-year-old Green was released from prison after DNA evidence cleared him of the crime and tied to it four others, who cannot be prosecuted because of the statute of limitations. Thrilled to be free, he still maintains a fierce perspective on what he experienced. He is angry at the woman for picking him from a lineup and mad at the police for, he believes, pressuring her to pick him and for likely stacking the deck in a photo lineup. He recalls “blowing up” when he heard the woman scream and pick him out of a live lineup. “I was blindingly, ferociously mad,” Green said. “I was screaming at the police. The detective said, ‘Why are you getting mad at me? I didn’t rape her. You did.’ That’s when I spit in his face.” For the record, Green does own up to his own foolishness. If he had worked a normal job and had not been arrested for auto theft, he would not have been around for the cops to identify. His photo would not have been placed in a series of photo lineups. Detectives would never have added two and two to get five. But that does not mean Green accepts responsibility for what happened later. “I did not fit any description,” he said. “The woman said the main guy was wearing a brown leather jacket. I had a white and brown ski jacket, the kind where you can unzip the sleeves. The guy supposedly had brown hair. Mine has always been black with a wave in it.” Wrong place, wrong time. That’s what it amounted to for the victim, who was left shivering and naked in a stolen car, and for Green, who made the mistake of walking in the general area on the same night. He recalls the trial as an out-of-body experience, like he was looking down on it from above, the defendant himself and at the same time a stranger. People said things about him that weren’t true. He told his story, but the jury did not believe him. Green, above all, thinks the people who mattered most should have known better — the assault victim and the cops. He said a police detective came up to him before he was shipped to prison and urged him to rat out his confederates. Green replied that he did not have anyone to take down with him. ‘You don’t get it,” he recalled telling the detective. “I didn’t do it.” Then, Green said, the detective mentioned that the four rapists who had abducted the woman in his case were still on the street assaulting other women. Green was stunned, and remembers asking the detective how he could not pass that on to those involved in his prosecution. “He said it wasn’t his case,” Green said.

Believed in the system

When he got to prison, Green would sit in his cell day after day thinking about what had happened, dissecting it again and again, bit by bit. He kept asking himself why they had found him guilty. There was so little evidence. His attorney, Bill Harmon, had argued passionately on his behalf, pointing out the discrepancies between Green and the descriptions given police, emphasizing how the victim told police that Green was not one of the assailants just minutes after the attack. Green said he was left with one conclusion: He was a young black man spotted in the area where a white woman was savagely attacked. He was known to be a car thief. He fit the mold: average height, average build, average going-nowhere life. It might as well be him. “I honestly believed wholeheartedly in the system,” he said. “That’s why I turned down an offer of five years. I could not say I did something that I did not do.” Then he remembered something else. “When I was standing in the lineup, seven different women were brought in to look at us,” he said. “Do you know how many of the others picked me as their rapist? Five. And the sixth said I might be. The only reason I did not get charged with those rapes is that I was in jail when they happened.”

A familiar scenario

Edwin Coalfax, who works with a criminal justice reform group called the Justice Project, said the scenario is all too familiar. He said faulty eyewitness testimony was the cause of conviction for the great bulk of the 43 inmates who have been exonerated in recent years. Most were freed through new testing of DNA evidence. Most had been convicted of sexual assault. For several legislative sessions, the Justice Project has been working with other groups, including lobbyists for law enforcement agencies and county district attorneys, to come up with new state laws standardizing live and photo lineup methods to minimize instances in which victims are inadvertently tipped to suspects by investigators. Research has repeatedly proved that sloppy ID methods lead to false IDs. Twice such a bill has failed. Coalfax thinks it has a good chance this time. “As problematic as eyewitness testimony is, we can’t do without it,” Coalfax said. “That’s why we have to do a much better job of taking those steps to make sure it is as reliable as possible. Our system is forced to rely on eyewitness testimony in many cases. The prospect of not prosecuting many cases that don’t have other evidence is not an option.”

Evidence issues

For all the misery that unjustly befell him, Green knows he is lucky. Had the Harris County District Attorney’s Office not been able to track down the victim’s pants, which still bore biological evidence left by her rapists, he still would be in prison. “I’ve got guys I think are innocent, but we have no evidence,” said Bob Wicoff, the attorney who worked to get Green released. “In Dallas County, they kept all the evidence, which is why you have seen so many exonerations that come from there. We would have just as many here if we had the evidence. But we don’t.” Of all those exonerated so far, Green served the longest time in prison. Like Wicoff, he knows inmates who are likely innocent but who will not get out until they are very old, if they live that long. “I feel blessed to be out,” Green said. “Being in prison felt like a dream. Then, one day I woke up in the morning, and it was over.” mike.tolson@chron.com